Over the past two months, protest marches in solidarity with the Palestinian people have taken place across the United States and Canada. They attracted a diverse crowd of people, including many Indigenous nations and communities.
Participants denounced “American imperialism” for enabling Israeli aggression, ethnic cleansing and genocide while others accused Israel itself of “settler colonialism.”
However, many participants – particularly pro-Palestinian immigrants – failed to understand their own relationship with settler colonialism. Many of us see the United States and Canada as secular democracies that offer good economic opportunities, not as colonial societies that serve as a model for Israel. We ignored our own complicity as settlers.
Muslims and South Asian, North African and Arab immigrants must question the legitimacy of the United States and Canada’s right to exist and the costly compromises they make in assuming national identities in these country, to the detriment of the indigenous peoples of their “country of origin”. and imperialist adventurism abroad.
Colonial history ignored
A significant number of Muslim migrants do not seem to understand that American societies are driven by white supremacist religious doctrines such as manifest destiny and the doctrines of discovery and terra nullius, the Protestant ethic, common property rights law and Victorian notions of gender and sexuality.
Muslim “comers” to the United States should instead consider the history of settler colonialism in the Americas – a history that sees Islamophobia and anti-Indigenous narratives as well as anti-Blackness and anti-Judaism inextricably linked.
In the late 15th century, the invasion of the Americas by Christopher Columbus’ conquistadores began as the European Crusades, expulsions, murders and forced conversions of Muslims and Jews in Andalusia, were coming to an end.
There, Muslims and Jews were racially and religiously characterized as “enemies,” “savages,” and “heathens,” an otherness that colored the vision through which Columbus and his successors viewed the indigenous peoples of the Americas, describing them as “blood drinkers”. “cannibals” and “devils”.
As Alan Mikhel writes in his book God’s Shadow, Columbus described the weapons used by the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean as “alfanjes, the Spanish name for scimitars used by Muslim soldiers”, while the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés identified 400 Aztec temples in Mexico. as “mosques,” described “Aztec women” as “Moorish women,” and referred to Montezuma, the Aztec leader, as a “sultan.”
Later, in the 16th century, with the start of the transatlantic slave trade, Africans – 20 to 30 percent of whom were Muslims – would become the new “infidels” and “savages.”
These were not simple insults, but Euro-American Christian religious and racial narratives of dehumanization that eventually found their way into religious doctrine, law, and settler attitudes in the United States.
They have been used to justify the expropriation of indigenous lands and resources as well as slavery and the pursuit of “afterlife of slavery” projects targeting black peoples. They have also fueled Islamophobia which, in recent years, has resulted in the Muslim ban, the US government’s full support for Zionist settler colonialism, and the death and destruction wrought as part of the ” war against terrorism.
Rather than questioning the roots and branches of the American colonial project, Muslim immigrants took it for granted and attempted to position themselves as “good liberal settlers”, ignoring their own colonial complicities, even when they come from countries ravaged by colonization. effects of American imperialist foreign policy.
American Nightmare
This love for the illusory promise of the “American Dream” runs counter to what the selectively cited anti-American Muslim Malcolm as well as an extensive scholarly body of work in indigenous, Palestinian, and comparative settlement studies.
This activism and work helps us understand that the United States’ imperial engagements abroad are influenced by the violence it has carried out against Black and Indigenous peoples in North America – or what the latter call l ‘Turtle Island.
As Eve Tuck, professor of critical race and indigenous studies at the University of Toronto, and K Wayne Yang, professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, write in an article titled Decolonization is not a metaphor: “Oil is the engine and motive of war, just like salt, so is water. Settler sovereignty over chunks of land, air, and water is what makes these imperialisms possible. … “Indian Country” was/is the term used in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq by the U.S. military for “enemy territory.” »
A good example is the war in Iraq. Critics and some U.S. officials were adamant that the war — led by Vice President Dick Cheney, former CEO of oil giant Halliburton — was intended to benefit big oil companies. However, it was not understood that American fighter planes, cruise missiles and armored vehicles could not have descended on Iraq in 2003 without fuel from the abundant oil reserves exploited on the land. indigenous people, which today makes the United States the largest oil producer in the world and, by far, the biggest polluter.
The 2016 Native-led NoDAPL protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, scheduled to take place near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, were a missed opportunity for Muslim and pro-Palestinian activists to center and connect deeper connections between settler colonialism at home and abroad.
Another glaring example of the relationship between settler colonialism at home and abroad can be found at Cornell University, the Ivy League institution where I was a visiting scholar last year and which also been a hub of pro-Palestinian activism in recent weeks.
Situated amid the bucolic countryside of upstate New York and teeming with waterfalls, gorges, and evergreens, Cornell is considered the largest university land grab in U.S. history and the largest beneficiary of the Morrill Act of 1862, which allowed 10.7 million acres (4.3 million hectares). ) stolen from 250 different indigenous peoples in 15 states and given to universities.
In this, Cornell profits from the principal revenues and capital of the land as well as surface extraction rights relating to minerals, resources, mining and water. Cornell University also partners with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, founded in 1912, whose military research and development laboratories pioneered Palestinian dispossession technologies.
The special responsibility of Muslims
Understanding our investment in settler colonialism should push us to oppose it altogether. This goes further than pickets, training, Boycott-Divestment-Sanction (BDS) campaigns, the blockade of arms manufacturers based on short-term crisis management, or the performative land recognitions that have become usual at land grab universities like Cornell.
This means transformational solidarity, a long-term process grounded in shared spiritual, ethical and political commitments that require a transformation of all our relationships, including with the local, historical and material geographies of the land on which we are located.
As Palestinian scholar Dana Olwan wrote in an article titled On Assumptive Solidarities in Comparative Settler Colonialisms, incidents in which “indigenous activists are invited to organize opening ceremonies of pro-Palestinian events” are numerous. and are often driven by the absence of deeper interrogation and contestation of “Canadian and American settler coloniality and thus normalizing the violence of these states”.
This type of transformational solidarity is not new. For example, it is customary in Chile, a country with the largest Palestinian population outside the Middle East, for Palestinians to march in solidarity with the indigenous Mapuche people in the annual Indigenous Peoples’ Day parade and work on earth with them.
Although these lines of solidarity exist in the United States at the level of mobilization, they are inconsistent at the organizational level. Land acknowledgments are about intention, purpose and most importantly action.
As Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), the pan-African spiritual revolutionary, says: “What mobilization does is it mobilizes people around issues. (But) those of us who are revolutionaries don’t care about the problems. We are concerned about the system. … Mobilization generally leads to reformative action, not revolutionary action.
As I write in my book Islam and Anarchism: Relations and Resonances, Muslim immigrants have a particular responsibility to act not only because of the geopolitical context of Islamophobia and Islam as the quintessential other by relation to Euro-American Christianity, but also arguably because of The Foundation of Islam and its relationship to social justice.
Appropriately aligned and as a quintessential signifier in the global orientalist shadow others are cast – as with the indigenous water protectors of NoDAPL, who have been likened by US mercenary companies like TigerSwan to “jihadist movements », and Black Lives Matter activists, who were designated by the FBI. as “black identity extremists” – Islam and Muslims are uniquely positioned to geopolitically demystify the intimate intersections between imperialism and “settler colonialism” in Palestine and Turtle Island.
By abdicating this responsibility, especially those of us who identify as Muslim immigrants from South Asia and North Africa, we become Zionists on stolen land while simultaneously exposing our hypocritical fantasies of liberation from Palestine – and ourselves.
This is why we, immigrants to the United States and Canada, must seriously reexamine our ethical and political commitments when it comes to supporting Palestine, founding an abolitionist and decolonial Islam, and forming alliances with indigenous peoples. and blacks in their demands for the repatriation of indigenous lands. as black repairs. We must move beyond reactionary paradigms of “survival” and “resistance” toward proactive, strategic movement goals that center our collective vitality, prosperity, and liberation. The liberation of Palestine is simultaneously linked to the liberation of the indigenous and black peoples of Turtle Island. To end the Palestinian occupation, the false American-Canadian bewitched dream must fall and be replaced by another truly decolonial enchantment.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.